


In Stages

by Frellywellies



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:21:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5967280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Frellywellies/pseuds/Frellywellies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He sometimes thought that it had been the most perverse stroke of bad luck that she had been the one to find him, shipwrecked on the floor of his little room. Almost anyone else would have been preferable."</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Stages

_Initial Stages of Morphine Withdrawal (approximately 6 to 12 hours after last injection): patient may complain of lachrymose thinking, nervousness and a degree of dysphoria. Craving for the drug is constant._

He had discovered that there was was a difference between wanting to be alone and wanting her to stay away.

That was how he had instructed her: insofar as it was possible, he would like to complete this process by himself. But the truth was, he would have readily welcomed a calm voice at his bedside or a hand to hold. Provided it came attached to someone who loved him, of course. Someone who would not secret his weakness in the back of their head and hold it eternally over him.

He realized that the list of such people was short and growing shorter each day.

In any event, the Baroness would never have appeared on such a list. Not her, with her disapproving little mouth and her repugnant air of certitude in her own moral superiority. All of this must have confirmed for her his own fundamental spiritual deficiencies.

He sometimes thought that it had been the most perverse stroke of bad luck that she had been the one to find him, shipwrecked on the floor of his little room. Almost anyone else would have been preferable.

Well. Not Miss Hastings. He shuddered to imagine the shape her ministrations would take.

And obviously not Hale, who would have finally had the ammunition he needed to run him out of the hospital. And, of course, the idea of Summers discovering him in such a bad way was almost unimaginable.

So, perhaps Miss Phinney was indeed the best-suited to be his clandestine caregiver. The best of bad options, at least.

And she did always obey him whenever he requested solitude. Even those times when it took all the tattered scraps of his will not to call out to her and beseech her to stay.

He could not fault her for that.

_Intermediate Stages (approximately 24 to 36 hours after last injection): involuntary muscle spasms, severe cramping and loose bowels, restlessness and elevated blood pressure._

Jed had never given much thought to what made a good nurse, perhaps because he had so seldom encountered them. But he thought now that a bit of Miss Phinney’s New England stoicism might be generally helpful in the profession.

Whatever awful thing she discovered whenever she opened his door, whatever new effluence he had managed to produce or what pitiable imitation of humanity he had twisted himself into, she did not react. Her face was as dull and unchanging as a porcelain mask with only her great, round eyes showing occasional flickers of the profound disgust she must have been feeling.

Her hands were similarly impersonal, even when performing the most intimate of tasks; washing him, adjusting him, feeling the texture and temperature of his feverish skin. It was hard to believe, in fact, that those hands belonged to a flesh-and-blood woman and not some marvelous automaton designed to dispense efficient, unfeeling care.

_Late Stages (36 to 72 hours after last injection): loss of motor function, vomiting. Previous symptoms increase in intensity._

It occurred to him as he was leaning heavily against her, struggling mightily to aim a rogue stream of urine into the pan, that this was the closest he had been to a woman in some time.

“Since Eliza left,” he might have said, but he would have known that to be a lie. Even before Eliza finally, inevitably, pulled up stakes, he had spent many more nights at the hospital than at home. When he did, on rare occasions, crawl into bed beside her, he found her soundly asleep. Or, so loathe to encounter him that she pretended to be so.

Physically, Mary Phinney was nothing like Eliza. She was considerably taller—as tall as he was—and she felt somehow more solid, as though she had found a way to root her feet into the very floorboards.

She didn’t smell like any woman he had ever known. All the thousand paints and powders and tinctures that managed to create a uniform melange of scents that he thought of as distinctly and exclusively feminine, she had none of that.

Mary Phinney smelled like the hospital itself. Like blood and chloroform; dirt and just an occasional whiff of gunpowder. And, underneath all that, there was another scent, one he took to be hers and hers alone. He did not have the words to describe it, except to say that it persistently made him think of sunshine, like the spring that bloomed outside his window.

_Final Stage (more than 72 hours after last injection): normal bodily functions restored. Gradual cessation of physical suffering. Remaining symptoms are primarily emotional in nature._

In his dreams, he was under the ice again, with Ezra. This time, though, he could not find the hole that Ez’s body had made going in. His fingers scrabbled uselessly at the smooth, unyielding underside of the ice as the two of them drifted further and further from the shores that they knew.

Something cold and black filled up his lungs and he screamed and screamed without sound.

He awoke to Mary’s face, half-illuminated by a candle. With her free hand, she was gently shaking his shoulder.

“You cried out,” she said, sounding almost sheepish.

It must have been very late, but she did not appear to have been sleeping. Her hair was still bound up neatly at the base of her skull and she was wearing one of her usual frocks.

“Vivid dreams,” Jed muttered, reaching for his log to record this latest information. This ordeal had begun as an experiment and damned if he wasn’t going to end it just the same way.

Mary rose up from the bed and began to pad across the floor. The sound was strange—she wasn’t wearing shoes, only her stockings. She had been sleeping then, but she apparently did so in her clothes, should an emergency arise.

Like a howling morphine addict, for example.

“Nurse Phinney,” he said, when she had nearly reached the door. “Would you remain?”

She turned to him and nodded, those big eyes of hers twice as luminous as her candle.

She drifted back towards the bed and settled herself in a chair while he scratched away in his little book. Neither of them spoke and that suited Jed just fine.

He awoke long before morning, his over-sensitive eyes reacting to the first nascent rays of sunlight. In the dim glow, he could see Mary, still sitting in the chair but now sleeping deeply. Her face looked remarkably different when she was not awake and could not exert such tight control over it; when she was not wearing her nurse’s mask.

Between the odd gloaming quality of the light and his own stinging eyes, he found something exquisite about her, though more like a work of art than a person. _The Diligent Nurse at Her Patient’s Bedside_ , oil on canvas.

All the same, she was good to look upon. The little crooked curl that was forever unfurling from its place at her temple, the tremblings of her chin as she dozed.

The thought materialized in his head, fully-formed and completely absurd: _I kissed those lips._

He had struggled mightily to forget his shameful conduct that night but there were moments, like now, when the sensations came to him unbidden. Her mouth had been brittle and resisting, lips already forming a reprimand. He wondered what her mouth would feel like under different circumstances; if she were willing. Eager, even.

It looked very soft now and very gentle, lips slightly parted to let slip a little occasional breath.

But she would not welcome a kiss from him, pitiable thing that he was, unable to control his own pathetic vices. He reeked of his own dried sweat and tasted bile all the time and he could not even piss without assistance. What woman could resist an overture from such a fine specimen of manhood?

Jed rolled on to his stomach and buried his face in the pillow, feigning sleep until some time later when he heard her awaken and arise, all very quietly. He expected that she would slip out now, careful to avoid yet another awkward encounter and thus he was surprised to feel the lightest of touches on the side of his face. She smoothed a bit of his hair behind his ear. It was the sort of thing he had seen her do occasionally down in the ward, a kindness she extended to the most wretched patients. The ones in the midst of the worst sort of suffering.


End file.
